I am an EECS PhD student at MIT, advised by Erik Demaine in CSAIL and Zach Lieberman at the Media Lab. My work has been generously supported by the MIT MAD Design Fellowship, the NSERC Postgraduate Scholarship, and the MIT Stata Family Presidential Fellowship.
I develop mathematical abstractions and computational systems to support new ways of designing and fabricating. My time is devoted in roughly equal parts to research, art, and teaching.
My research—often taking the form of varied thought experiments—centers on synthesizing ideas across domains in designing new ways of thinking and making. As such, my work spans human–computer interaction, computer graphics and vision, theoretical computer science, and art. While I publish in academic venues, I’m equally drawn to alternative outcomes of research. I've found the right homes for my ideas through artworks, creative tools, and educational resources.
How can we design garments for change and reuse? By reimagining garments as dynamic assemblies rather than static products, Refashion enables users to resize, restyle, and remix their garments on demand.
How can we thread tubes with single string to achieve the desired structure when pulling the string taut? By viewing the problem from a graph-theoretical lens, we present efficient algorithms for computing minimum-length threadings.
How can we create constellations with unconventional star arrangements? We propose a method that automatically generates constellations from graph-based descriptions, using circle packings as scaffolding.
Mathematics and computation provide alternative vocabularies for making. I consider them as artistic media in some of my artworks.
I’ve taught extensively at MIT and UBC with a focus on algorithms. Outside academia I’ve led computational art classes for middle and high school students to reshape perceptions of who programmers are and what programs can do.
Sometimes I fear that some tremendous beauty is lost on me.
A small archive of (largely personal) thoughts—messages, poems, and essays—that complement my art and (sometimes) research.
